This Time, About Pain

Writer, critic and university professor Mihajlo Pantić won Belgrade City Literary Award for his book "Ovoga Puta o Bolu" (This Time, About Pain) published in 2007. The motif of pain dominates each of the book's twelve short stories, but reading each one brings about a catharsis; a cleansing through reading the lines about everyday events in New Belgrade, events that are filled with monotonous meditations and intimate memories.

"Writing is a form of cleansing, and sometimes of anesthesia. But, one cannot write about pain while one is experiencing it; pain has no form, as an Italian poet said. Pain must pass to a certain degree, or be pushed to deeper reaches in order to be spoken of. The amount of pain has nothing to do with the quality of a story, just as experienced suffering is no guarantee of artistic value. But, it is also true that pain and suffering do inspire storytelling. We do have a need to ease the pain by talking about it. Naturally, in an artistically articulated manner. Like everyone else, I too, suffered pain of this or that kind and had an urge to think it out in a literary way. This constitutes a clear and strong motive to write." / Mihajlo Pantić /

Mihajlo Pantić (1957) is a Serbian writer and literary critic. He has published 25 books - short stories, essays, critiques, anthologies. Some of his collections of short stories are: “The Chronicle of the Room' (1984), “Wonder in Berlin” (1987), “Poets, Writers and the Rest of the Menagerie” (1992), “I Can't Remember a Single Sentence” (2000), “If This Is Love”(2003), “This Time, About Pain” (2007). He is also a compiler of the anthologies: “An Anthology of Serbian story. 1945-1995" (1997), “Reading the Water – Serbian Stories About Fishery” (1998) and “A Small Box – the Briefest Serbian Stories of the XX Century” (2001).

Some of Mihajlo Pantić's short stories have appeared in various anthologies and have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Czech, Slovenian and Macedonian.

Mihajlo Pantić is a vice president of the Serbian PEN center board. He teaches “History of Serbian Literature” and “Creative Writing” at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. He is also the editor of literary editions “Albatros” and “Pan” and of the literary magazines “Svet reči” (“The World Of The Words”) and “Književni glasnik” (“The Literary Journal”).